1. The new rulers may fit themselves into the patterns of the old regime, making few fundamental changes. Many low-level functionaries of the old administration will keep their positions and will continue to rule the villages much as they did before. This is what happened to China under Yuan Shikai (Yuan Shih-k’ai) and then Chiang Kai-shek and to South Vietnam under successive regimes, several of them claiming to be “revolutionary,” in Saigon. It also happened under the Communists, briefly and in limited areas, in both China and Vietnam.

2. The new government may carry out what is usually called a “nationalist” program, asserting itself against foreign powers and autonomous satrapies within the country, and pushing modernization and economic development. This program will substantially alter the socioeconomic structure of the country, making most of the population both richer and more secure, but it will not necessarily narrow the gap between rich and poor. This is what the Meiji Restoration did in Japan and what anti-Communist “nationalists” promised but never managed to accomplish in Vietnam and China.

3. The third possibility is a real social revolution, in which the poor are mobilized to overthrow the basic structure of society in favor of a new and presumably more egalitarian order. There need not be any conflict between the social revolution and the “nationalist” revolution. Most Communists would argue that, in the long run, the two revolutions cannot be separated; that in a nation made up mostly of poor peasants, it is only by giving the poor a real stake in the revolution that revolutionary leaders can acquire enough support to attain nationalist goals. The Chinese and Vietnamese Communist parties can find considerable evidence for this assertion. While carrying out major social reforms, they have mobilized immense numbers of peasants to work for nationalist goals. It would be very hard to argue that the nationalist goals could have been better accomplished if the social reforms had been omitted.

Still, there can be many short-term conflicts between the goals of egalitarian reform and those of nationalism or simple administrative efficiency. Almost any specific task can be accomplished faster if all energies are focused on that task. Mobilizing the peasants to destroy the traditional elite in the villages and to root out elements sympathetic to that elite from the revolutionary organizations themselves may produce long-term benefits. But at the same time it can distract attention from immediate problems of administration and agricultural production. In the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, therefore, people who sincerely believed in egalitarian reforms sometimes felt obliged to put them off for months (land reform in China often came to a halt during the seasons when the peasants most needed to be in the fields), or even years (both China and Vietnam postponed land reform to concentrate on resistance to foreign invaders).

There are, of course, conflicts between individuals and groups within Communist parties over how much social reform should be carried out and how quickly. During the land reform, disagreements at the top levels of the Chinese and Vietnamese parties were seldom extreme. Changes in policy were more often based on shifts in the views of the leadership as a whole, or on changing circumstances, than on shifts from the dominance of one group of leaders to the dominance of another. But at lower levels there was usually a broad range of views, from leftist zealots determined to level economic inequalities at once, regardless of consequences, to landlords who had infiltrated the Party in order to preserve their power and privileges. At any given time, Communist leaders were likely to be dealing with both leftist and rightist deviations by local cadres.

The most important stage of the social revolution, in both China and Vietnam, was land reform. This movement involved much more than taking land from the landlords and giving it to the poor; it was directed against all the sources from which the old rural elite drew its power. In the economic sphere these included not only land but also draft animals, grain stocks, agricultural tools, and money. In some areas usury was a more serious problem than tenancy. The landlords’ power was also bolstered by their control of key social and political organizations: village administrations, clan organizations, religious bodies, and occasionally local branches of the Communist Party. The goal of the land reform was not only to take away the land and other wealth of the landlords but to cut them off from the psychological and organizational bases of their power and to destroy their prestige, so that they would lose all influence over the peasants. This meant that it was dependent on the genuine participation of the peasants in a way that is not true of most land-reform programs in non-Communist countries, which begin and end with the transfer of land ownership. The peasants were supposed to take the land from its former owners themselves, rather than get it as a gift from the government. Du Runsheng (Tu Jun-sheng), a senior CCP spokesman on land reform, said in 1950:

Revolutionary leaders in China and Vietnam, although following the Russian pattern of distributing land to the peasants in private smallholdings before moving toward the eventual goal of collectivization, were able to use this pattern to greater advantage. In the Russian Revolution, the peasants took over landlord land in a very disorganized fashion, starting in the summer of 1917. This probably could not have occurred if the Bolshevik Party had not first weakened and then overthrown Kerensky and the Provisional Government. But in most areas land distribution was not carried out directly by the Bolshevik Party; the peasants undertook it themselves, taking advantage of the climate the Bolsheviks had created. In some areas land distribution was even led by members of the Social Revolutionary Party, traditionally a more peasant-oriented party than the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks therefore did not get full credit from the peasants for the land reform. The policies that seemed to the peasants to be specifically Bolshevik policies were the confiscatory taxes necessitated by the civil war of 1918-20, and later the Stalinist collectivization.

In China and North Vietnam, land reform was carried out under clear Communist leadership. It was an opportunity for the Communists both to win the gratitude of the poor and to develop a political structure in the villages, recruiting cadres from among the peasants. In many areas of both China and Vietnam, the land reform and associated campaigns provided the first real contact between the Communist parties and the peasants, which helps to explain why relations between the Party and the peasants have been better in these countries than in the Soviet Union. Collectivization in particular proved far easier in China and Vietnam.

The techniques of land reform took a long time to develop. When elements of the Chinese Communist Party first began establishing rural guerrilla bases in the late 1920s, they had no clear ideas about how to mobilize the poor against the rich. By the early 1930s, they had evolved a very radical land reform policy, which was applied in the Jiangxi (Kiangsi) Soviet and other areas. The radical policy being carried out in the Soviet Union at this time probably had a considerable influence.

In the mid 1930s, the CCP decided to compromise on the class struggle in order to form a united front against the Japanese invasion of China. From 1937 until 1945 policies toward the landlords varied considerably but were for the most part moderate. After Japan was defeated, the civil war between the CCP and the Guomindang (Kuomintang) government resumed. War was accompanied by a renewed land reform, which was radical but not so much so as that of the Jiangxi period. Most of North and Northeast China had been covered by the time the war ended in 1949. The remainder of the country, except for some ethnic minority areas, underwent land reform between 1950 and 1953 under policies less radical than those of either the Jiangxi period or the late 1940s.

The Vietnamese Communist Party² first acquired control of large areas of Vietnam late in World War II. For most of the 1940s it was too preoccupied with struggles against the Japanese and then the French to do much against the landlords. Around 1950, as the Party gained ground in its struggle for independence from France, egalitarian reform policies starting with rent reduction became practical. Emphasis on class struggle increased after the passage of a formal land-reform law (very similar to Chinese laws) in 1953 and the end of the war against France in 1954. By late 1955 and early 1956, wild excesses were being committed in the name of class struggle; a campaign to correct the resulting errors lasted from late 1956 to early 1958.

The Vietnamese land-reform law was clearly based on Chinese models, although there were some modifications. This imitation was possible because the economic and political situations of the two countries had a surprising amount in common, at least on the surface, at the time of their revolutions.

Both China and Vietnam were relatively poor agricultural societies with high population densities, deficient in land and capital. In many areas, hunger was the normal condition of life. An unexpected disaster, natural or man-made, could bring devastating famine. There was considerable inequality, without any formal class system to stabilize social and economic status. Both upward and downward mobility could occur, although in Vietnam the communal landholding system had some stabilizing effect. Land was scarce, and its control was crucial to political and economic power. This pattern is in contrast to the traditional situation in most of mainland Southeast Asia outside Vietnam, where land had been plentiful, and until quite recently the key to power had been control of the labor that could put this land under cultivation.

The predominant pattern in China and North Vietnam—the situation with which the land reform was designed to deal—was one of farms operated by individual families and of private land ownership moderately concentrated. The potential beneficiaries of land reform were mostly peasant families which already operated small farms, but either did not own the land they worked or did not have enough land. The potential victims included a few very large landlords, but most were people of rather moderate wealth—medium and small landlords, rich peasants, and perhaps well-to-do middle peasants. Land-reform planners had to deal with questions such as: How to draw the line, among these people of moderate wealth, between those who should have their land taken and those who should not? How to ensure that people who were not rich enough to have land taken from them, but not poor enough to be given more land, would side with the poor rather than the rich, or at least remain neutral? How to undermine the authority and prestige of landowners who lived in the villages where they owned land, knew their tenants, and had ruled the villages for as long as anyone could remember?

There were areas of China and North Vietnam with patterns other than that just described, but the variations seldom created exceptional difficulties for the land reform. Most of them actually made it simpler. Where plantation agriculture had used techniques of large-scale production that would have been difficult to maintain if the plantations had been split into smallholdings, the government took them over and ran them as state farms. Where all the land had been owned by a few extremely wealthy landlords (likely to be absentees), it could be taken from them much more easily than from a large number of small landlords, and with less worry about borderline cases.³ Where considerable amounts of land had been held communally or by clan organizations, it was distributed to the poor like landlord land; the difficulties of undermining the authority and prestige of the former managers of such land were about the same as if they had been its owners. The serious problems of land reform—the problems with which this book will primarily be concerned—were the problems of the typical areas, where the land was owned by individual families, worked by individual families, and moderately concentrated.⁴

Both China and Vietnam had long traditions of administrative government. The emperors had tried actually to rule their countries through formal civil service systems. There was supposed to be a uniform administration over the whole of these countries, even if it was a very superficial administration by the standards of the modern nation state. This was strikingly different from the more common pattern in societies at this economic level, which is for the central government to have little role in administration except in the immediate vicinity of the capital. Strong central administration was less of a break with the past in China and Vietnam than it would have been in most of Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, it went much further than its traditional prototypes. A great variety of decisions formerly made by individuals had become government matters in both China and Vietnam by 1960. The central governments had more control over provincial officials, and these officials had more control over the population. (These facts are linked; the traditional regimes would not have dared to trust their own officials with so much power.) The mass population, in turn, had far more control over both the composition and the behavior of local administrations than it had had before the revolution. There was greater political integration and more communication at all levels. This required the recruitment and training of a new local elite that could be trusted to serve the interests both of the central government and of the mass population far more reliably than the old elite. In most villages, land reform was the most important stage of the process by which the old elite was destroyed and the new one created.

In both China and Vietnam, the revolutions that carried out land reform were also nationalist revolutions in a direct and immediate sense; they had to fight off foreign invasions. Many people from the exploiting classes therefore supported these revolutions, at least for a time. Revolutionary leaders had to balance the danger of weakening the nationalist struggle by alienating such supporters against the danger of weakening the class struggle by accepting them. What made the problem especially embarrassing was that, in both countries, the logic of the rural situation called for the initiation of radical class struggle at a time when the Party was still trying to present a moderate face to urban populations. The compromises that resulted did not produce optimal results in either cities or countryside.

In both countries, land redistribution was carried out in the context of revolutionary mass mobilization. Peasant organizations with considerable power were set up in the villages to implement the reform. These village organizations carried out complex programs, which made allowances for various special cases and at least tried to approach what revolutionary leaders regarded as an optimal distribution of land. Such tasks would have been beyond the administrative capacity of a government trying to carry out land reform simply as an administrative process, imposed and supervised from outside the villages. Thus if we examine the Japanese land reform of the late 1940s, we will find that although it was extremely radical in its redistributive goals, it was also relatively crude. It did not distinguish between people who rented out land because they were rich and could not be bothered to cultivate it themselves, and those who owned a small amount of land, which they were for some reason unable to cultivate and which they therefore rented out. An attempt to make such a distinction would have provided a loophole for massive evasion of the law, and no political base for the land reform, capable of blocking such evasion, had been established within the villages. Japan likewise did not try to distribute land on an equal basis; almost all land simply went to whoever had been the tenant on 23 November 1945. A proposal for distribution of land among the poor on a more equal basis had been rejected; Ronald Dore comments that it would have led “to appalling difficulties of execution.”⁵ Government officials supported by mass mobilization were able to carry out quite sophisticated programs in China and Vietnam.

The central concern of this book will be the extremely complex relationship between policymaking by Communist leaders and actual events in the villages. I shall try to demonstrate four main points:

1. Land reform is not a natural outgrowth of village life. Peasants, left to themselves, do not think in the patterns required for a campaign of the type carried out in China and North Vietnam. Therefore, the program in those countries had to be initiated by a revolutionary leadership outside the villages.

2. However, it could not be something simply imposed from the outside. Participation by local peasants had to be genuine and enthusiastic. This meant that the peasants, or at least a significant fraction of them, had not only to accept policies introduced from the outside, but to understand the rationale of those policies well enough to apply them creatively.

3. When Communist leaders tried to persuade peasants to...